Summary

Between 12:29 UTC and 14:00 UTC, a subset of customers experienced agents that were unresponsive or significantly delayed. The disruption was caused by an upstream incident at Microsoft Azure affecting the Azure OpenAI service in the East US 2 region, which caused authentication failures on requests to certain GPT-4.1 model deployments.

What happened

At approximately 12:29 UTC, a portion of our model traffic to Azure OpenAI's East US 2 region began failing with authentication errors. Our credentials had not changed, and we confirmed our configuration was correct on our side — ruling out any issue within our platform. Further investigation confirmed an active Azure-side incident impacting OpenAI services in East US 2.

Impact

• Duration: ~1 hour 31 minutes (12:29 UTC – 14:00 UTC)

• Scope: A subset of agent traffic dependent on the affected Azure region

• Symptoms: Agents not responding, elevated response latency, request timeouts

Resolution

The incident resolved automatically once Microsoft restored service in the East US 2 region. No changes were required on our side, confirming the issue originated upstream at Azure.

Follow-up actions

While the root cause was external, we are taking steps to reduce the impact of similar upstream provider incidents in the future:

1. Expanding automatic failover coverage so authentication issues from any single provider region are transparently rerouted to healthy regions.

2. Broadening the set of error conditions that trigger immediate failover.

3. Improving monitoring of direct provider incident notifications, as public provider status dashboards did not reflect the outage in a timely manner.

We apologize for the disruption and appreciate your patience while Azure restored service.